Because the world was nothing more than terrifying to a child who lost their parents suddenly. A child who’d had to learn at an early age that you could wake up one morning expecting everything to be the same, and find that it was irrevocably changed.
Broken beyond repair.
She’d heard it said that it was always darkest before the dawn. That the night would end, and the sun would rise, but Iris had learned that when the sun rose, your grief would still be there. And the loss would remain.
That saying didn’t mean that everything would be fine. That everything would go back to the way it was.
All it meant to her was that time would march on, whether you were ready for it to or not.
And here time was, marching on. And she surely wasn’t ready for it. Not remotely. She was being left behind by it.
And Rose was here wanting pancakes. While she had a fiancé she would go home with tonight. A man who would hold her in his arms. A future that wasn’t just assisting in the lives of other people.
Iris tramped out of the kitchen, through the living room and out toward her car, where she put all the pancake objects onto the passenger seat. Then she went back into the house, and opened up the freezer. She selected a couple of different meal options from there, held them to her chest as she stalked back outside.
“Don’t be mad at me,” Rose said from the porch, leaning against one of the support beams.
She turned and looked at her sister, who looked comically young and plaintive. And Iris didn’t feel young at all.
She felt every inch the old maid spinster that she was. Having a fit with a bag of pancake mix, though. So, there was that. It was different, at least.
“I’m not,” Iris said, even though her heart felt bruised, and she did feel a little bit mad, thank you very much.
“I don’t take you for granted,” Rose said. “I know that this made it seem like I do. But I don’t. You are the best, Iris. And if it weren’t for you, I wouldn’t have... I wouldn’t have Logan, that’s for sure. I wouldn’t be any kind of well-adjusted. You took care of me. You put your life on hold for me. Don’t think that I don’t realize that.”
“I know you realize it. And you tried to fix it by setting me up with the worst man in the entire world.”
“Hey,” Rose said, “he wasn’t the worst.”
Iris suddenly felt fatigued. “No. He was. Because you could have set me up with a guy with a neck tattoo, at least. And he might’ve been a terrible choice, but he wouldn’t have been... Boring. Or easy. And I am so tired of boring and easy. I am so tired of the biggest thing in my life—the biggest feeling I’ve ever had—being grief. That is the most defining thing in my life, Rose. And I am really tired of it.”
“It defined all of us,” Rose said, softly.
“Yes. But now you’re marrying Logan. You’re going to be his wife. You’re a rancher. You’re strong. Ryder is a father, and he’s a husband. He’s a cowboy. Pansy is the chief of police, and West’s wife and Emmett’s... I don’t know, surrogate mother. And what am I? I’m nothing different than I was back then. I’m just... Poor Iris. I am so sick of being poor Iris. I want to be more. I want to be everything. I want to have big crazy feelings, so that something overshadows my grief. Maybe I can be a business owner. I can open the bakery. That’s what I want.”
And she thought of Griffin, and his compelling blue eyes. His hands, which she had noticed were quite large.
But she said nothing about that. Left it at the bakery, and nothing more.
She didn’t understand the fixation she had with him, and had no real idea if it was real or something borne out of forced proximity and her deep need to rattle the foundation of her life.
Better kept to herself either way.
“I understand how you feel,” Rose said. “But I promise you nobody just thinks of you as poor Iris.”
But Iris had always been able to tell when Rose was lying. And this was no exception. She didn’t say anything. Instead, she rounded the car, going to the driver’s side, and got inside. Then she started the engine.
It wasn’t up to Rose to see her different. Not when Iris wasn’t doing different.
Iris had to see herself different. She had to change herself. No one was going to treat her the way she wanted if she didn’t first figure out how to become what she wanted to be.
So she was taking the pancakes, and she was leaving. And she was well within her rights to do that.
Maybe it would surprise them. And as rebellions went, she had to admit that it was a pretty small and strange one. But she would take it. Because she didn’t have much else.
She drove down the winding road that led to Echo Pass, humming a tune along the way. And when she realized it was a hymn, she abruptly stopped, because that certainly wasn’t doing anything to shake up her image.
It was strange that this road felt familiar already. That the cabin seemed like a place she knew well even though this was only her third time here.
It was a haven, if nothing else. A symbol of the new steps that she was taking in her life.
Same as yesterday, when she approached the cabin, she didn’t see him anywhere. And when she knocked, he didn’t answer.
She pushed the door open cautiously, and found that—again—same as yesterday, he wasn’t there.
She didn’t know where he went during the day, and it wasn’t really her business. Still, she found herself curious about the man she had struck up a strange business relationship with. More than she would like to admit. More than she would like to be.
But he was... She had never met a man like him before. She went into the kitchen area of the small cabin and began to open up the cabinets. She had already looked through them, so she didn’t know why she felt compelled to do it again. But she found things much the same as they had been.
He had a bottle of Tabasco sauce. Salt and pepper. Canned chili. Canned vegetables. The kind of thing she would only eat in an absolute emergency. The kind of food they had eaten after their parents had died, actually.
When the casseroles had quit coming from the neighbors, when people had forgotten about their tragedy, and had gone back to their own lives, while the Danielses had settled in to a life that would never be the same again, there had been canned chili.
It was, to her, the kind of food that you got once your tragedy had been forgotten by those around you, but your grief remained.
The food of a person steeped in a half-life.
She touched the bottle of Tabasco. It wasn’t open. So he might have the ability to add flavor to his food, but she wasn’t certain he did. This was the kind of food a person had when they were in a life they didn’t particularly like.